The world is projected to hold a whopping 9.6 billion people by 2050. Figuring out how to feed all these people—while also advancing rural development, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting valuable ecosystems—is one of the greatest challenges of our era.

So what’s causing the global food challenge, and how can the world solve it? We begin to answer these questions through a series of graphics below. For more information, check out the interim findings of Creating a Sustainable Food Future, a report produced by WRI, U.N. Environment Programme, U.N. Development Programme, and the World Bank.

What's Causing the Global Food Crisis?

Feeding an Exploding Population

The world’s population is projected to grow from about 7 billion in 2012 to 9.6 billion people in 2050. More than half of this growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where one-quarter of the population is currently undernourished.

Shifting Diets

In addition to population growth, world’s per capita meat and milk consumption is also growing—especially in China and India—and is projected to remain high in the European Union, North America, Brazil, and Russia. These foods are more resource-intensive to produce than plant-based diets.

The Food Gap

Taking into account a growing population and shifting diets, the world will need to produce 69 percent more food calories in 2050 than we did in 2006.

It’s Not a Distribution Problem

We can’t just redistribute food to close the food gap. Even if we took all the food produced in 2009 and distributed it evenly amongst the global population, the world will still need to produce 974 more calories per person per day by 2050.

Agriculture’s Environmental Footprint

But we can’t just produce more food in the same way as today—we also must reduce food’s environmental impact. Agriculture contributes nearly one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, uses 37 percent of landmass (excluding Antarctica), and accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

Climate Change and Water Stress Exacerbate the Challenge

Climate change is expected to negatively impact crop yields, particularly in the hungriest parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

Growing water use and rising temperatures are expected to further increase water stress in many agricultural areas by 2025.

The Energy-Food Nexus

Another major challenge is biofuels’ competition for land and crops. Producing 10 percent of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2050, as planned by some governments, would require 32 percent of global crop production but produce only 2 percent of global energy. It would also increase the food gap to roughly 100 percent. Conversely, eliminating the use of crop-based biofuels for transportation would close the food gap by roughly 14 percent.

Food’s Role in Economic Development

Around 2 billion people are currently employed in agriculture, many of them poor. We need to close the food gap in ways that enhance the livelihoods of farmers, especially the poorest.

Shift to Healthier Diets

Beef is the least efficient source of calories and protein, generating six times more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of protein than pork, chicken, and egg production. Shifting just 20 percent of the anticipated future global consumption of beef to other meats, fish, or dairy could spare hundreds of millions of hectares of forest and savannah.

Achieve Replacement Level Fertility

Reducing population growth can help hold down food demand. While most regions are projected to reach replacement level fertility—or the rate at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next—sub-Saharan Africa’s population is on course to more than double between now and 2050.

Boost Crop Yields

Boosting yields is particularly important in sub-Saharan Africa, which currently has world’s lowest cereal yields but will account for one-third of all additional calories needed in 2050.

Improve Land and Water Management

Conservation agriculture—such as reduced tillage, crop rotations, and mulching—increased maize yields in Malawi. Combining these techniques with agroforestry—intercropping with trees—further increased yields. These practices could be scaled up on more than 300 million hectares in sub-Saharan Africa.

Shift Agriculture to Degraded Lands

Shifting agriculture land expansion to degraded lands can prevent deforestation, protect resources, and curb climate change. For example, more than 14 million hectares of low-carbon degraded lands in Kalimantan, Indonesia are potentially suitable for oil palm development.

Increase Aquaculture’s Productivity

As wild fish catches have plateaued, aquaculture has expanded, producing nearly half of fish consumed in 2009. To grow in a sustainable way, aquaculture will need to produce more fish per unit of land and water and reduce its reliance on wild-caught fish for feed.

Closing the Food Gap

No one solution can create a sustainable food future. A menu of consumption- and production-focused strategies, including those presented here, can close the food gap and generate environmental, health, and development co-benefits. But governments, business, and others need to act quickly and with conviction to scale these solutions up.

Sources for Graphics

Growing Population: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UNDESA). 2013. World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision. New York: United Nations. Total population by major area, region, and country. Medium fertility scenario.

Food Distribution: WRI analysis based on FAO. 2012. “FAOSTAT.” Rome: FAO; United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UNDESA). 2013. World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision. New York: United Nations. Medium fertility scenario.

Annual Crop Production: WRI analysis based on Bruinsma, J. 2009. The Resource Outlook to 2050: By how much do land, water and crop yields need to increase by 2050? Rome: FAO; Alexandratos, N., and J. Bruinsma. 2012. World agriculture towards 2030/2050: The 2012 revision. Rome: FAO.

Current and Projected Fertility Rates: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (UNDESA). 2013. World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision. New York: United Nations. Total fertility by major area, region, and country. Medium fertility scenario.

We should consider population growth and hunger as the main ingredients for predominance of Capitalism and economical concentration, not an undesired consequence.

Without the following we will always be upside down, no matter the efforts and in spite of large company´s lobby (seed providers, agrochemicals, Investments trusts, banks) to gvmnts and influence of public opinion :

Land reform/redistribution
Planified agriculture: balance : large estate / small scale agriculture
Subsidies cut for US and UE farmers.
Plan and promote change of habits and practise with diet, food production and food waste.
Improve agriculture in a sustainable and healthy way: reduce/ stop expansion of transgenic and agrochemical use.

I agree. The problems presented and the solutions suggested are very real. But this single spectrum method of equating Food to calories consumed is faulty to the core and can yield only false numbers, and therefore lead to solutions which are not solutions at all but crucibles for the making of more monstrous problems.

I will give a simple example.
The village folk working on my few acres of agricultural land and in small plots nearby ( dryland farming, interior Karnataka, India). General diet:

Breakfast: No coffee, tea etc.
One large baseball size round of "Raagi mudde" ( cooked finger millet flour, left covered in water the previous night) with "bele saaru" (mixed dryland pulses, whatever vegetable, greens, picked from hedgerows, scattered small vegetable plots etc., some spices cooked together witha spoon of oil.)
The slightly fermented water in which the mudde was soaked is drunk either plain or with a pinch of salt and a few spoons of buttermilk. A raw onion and a green chilli to go with with the meal.

Lunch: Same as above, freshly cooked, with a change in the vegetables. Usually a side dish of stir fry greens is added.

Dinner: Red rice with rasam (thin soup made of pulses), with some buttermilk (if available). Jaggery, with roasted sesame seeds, peanuts and suchlike, when available.

And these people are healthier than most people like me, urban based, eating to "scientific" dictates on nutrition, quantity and variety, if we judge health by capacity for physical work in hard circumstances, capacity for adjustment to shortages and plenty, capacity to not fall ill if the cloud covers the sun, be of mental cheer even when the present is difficult and the future is promising to be the same, be willng and happy to share the little they have, and still have creativity and divinity to make music out of a string on a coconut shell, or practice for weeks to act the part of a Rama or Ravana in the annual local "jaatre" or village festival.

The problem is when these people do not get even this to eat. For which the principle cause is that I and my kind eat too much, waste too much, pay too little to the farmer for what I take from him, and charge too much for what I give him.

One chart I would like to see would be one showing all land used for agriculture broken down into the percentages used for food, and for other less essential products, including the following:
1. Vegetable based food for direct human consumption -vegetables, grains, oil seeds.
2. Animal Feed, for cattle, pigs, chickens, including grazing land for beef and sheep
3. Sugar for human consumption (beets and cane)
4. Biofuels production, mainly corn and sugar cane
5. Coffee and tea
6. Wine
7. Beer
8. Alcohol produced from grain, potatoes, agave, etc.
9. fiber for clothing, mainly cotton

In the Pacific Northwest where I live, we are seeing an explosion of land being used for hops used for beer, and grapes for wine. We may be able to afford this, and I do not feel that we have a responsibility to feed those in other countries where their population growth is outstripping their food production capabilities. However, I do feel that we may need to make hard choices about how many fish and bird species we are willing to drive into extinction so that we can have wasteful agricultural products such as beef, beer, wine, alcohol to drink, and alcohol to run our vehicles.

The graphics depicting the huge areas of water stress are particularly shocking, and offer a very compelling visual on the pressing need to improve both water and land management. Given the changing face of crop production by shifting to degraded lands is particularly compelling--although I wonder if the drying out of aquifers in many mismanaged regions, such as in the midwestern United States, which I partly reviewed at http://wp.me/p36T6t-xr, might create even greater stressors in the US, if crops planning is not shifted. Thanks for this review!

Your graphic of crop yield runs from -50% to +100%. I assume the scale is linear, so a plus 10% increase in yield is represented in pink. Does this paint an accurate picture? I always associate pink with "nearly red" i.e. a dangerous reduction in yield. From my reading of the graphic most of the world will experience an increase in yields apart from Saudi Arabia, the Namibia desert and Western Australia, where you don't need many fewer crops to register a 50% fall.

Great to see you touch on key points regarding food challenge. Glad to see you highlight the shifting diets and consumption, especially the increasing consumption of Meat for food. Also agree that Meat and diary production is certainly more resource-intensive to produce than plant-based diets. My two cents on the topic http://www.mohanbabuk.com/2014/04/feeding-9-billion-people-can-it-start....

I write the Brazil, working as a researcher images to textbooks at Editora in Brazil, based in São Paulo, Capital, Brazil.
We are producing a collection of English language books for the education of students publish. For the book name Project Apoema Ingles 7th year, we would like to insert the image of Infographic Food Loss and Wast in the book of the kernels. Who can I talk to ask for authorization and budget?